Carl Linnasus Life and Achievements. Essays

Carl Linnasus Life and Achievements. Essays Carl Linnasus Life and Achievements. Essay Carl Linnasus Life and Achievements. Essay Carl Linneaus is the best-known Swedish scientist across the globe. He has left his mark in many ways places baring his name and even parts of the moon have been named after him he is even depicted on Swedish banknotes. The reason for his fame and his stamp on scientific history known as the Linnaean era is for his ambition to catalogue, organise and name the whole natural world. He is most recognized as a botanist but was also a physician and a zoologist who laid the foundations for the current scheme of nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy and is thought as one of the fathers of modern ecology. Although best known as a botanist his scientific achievements expand into the mineral world and zoology. Always being curios about the complete natural world since a young age he wanted to know the whole map of nature. This mapping is the name convention known as the â€Å"binary nomenclature† that he himself introduced. Linnaeus published rule-books on the criteria of the system and after initially some resistance it has become not to just control natural history but influences other fields of science. Linnaeus based his science on a firm terminology, which formulates the concept of species and sets the broad dimensions of natural history. For example humans in this system are known as Homo Sapiens and are the primates class of mammals and Mammalia are all concepts from Linnaeus. In the early eighteenth century scientific name for species were already in Latin but most were often long and awkward. Linnaeus’ idea was to divide nature into separate groups based on sharing physical characteristics. Firstly there were the three kingdoms of plants, animals and minerals. Kingdoms were then divided into classes and then orders which were then split into genera, then species. Since then a few other ranks have been added, most notably phyla or divisions between kingdoms and classes. Groups of organisms at any rank are now called taxa or taxonomic groups. Linnaus gave all the plants that were known at that time a simpler Latin name which was in two parts; known as binomial The first part being the genus then the species. He gave binomials names to animals five years later and between 1753 and his death he named thousands of plants and animals this way. The binomial system was then adopted by other scientists and became the standard way of naming organisms. Linnaeus was also a pioneer in definting the concept of â€Å"race†. He proposed that inside of Homo sapiens were four subcategories. These categories were, Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeanus and were based on originally place of orgin and then later on skin colour. Linnaesus’ influence upon science is huge. His system of classification allowed for clear and easy description of plants, animals, minerals and forms for the basis for modern classificiation. His species Plantarum and systema naturae provide the starting point for the nomenclature of plants and animals respectively. Linnaeus identified ecology as a distinctive area of investigation emphasising on the interrelationships in nature as the â€Å"economy of nature† he was also one of the first naturalists to describe food chains. Throughout Linnaeus’ life he was driven by a lust for a nature and a passion and desire to understand how it worked. Today his legacy still remains and is used by many dedicated scientists driven by the same thing.